Behind the sound · September 2025 · Tomek Piskor-Ślesicki

Recording Bardzo: a stage piano, recorded the wrong way round

The most interesting thing about this grand piano is what isn't there. The soundboard, gone. One string in three, gone. And the pickup it was built around, I left unplugged.

Most piano libraries are the same few instruments: a Steinway D, a Yamaha C7, the concert grands you've heard a thousand times. Nothing wrong with them. I wanted a piano with a character of its own, and to keep the parts a normal library spends months scrubbing out.

That meant an instrument that played by different rules, and it ended with an electro-acoustic grand. Quite possibly the instrument that inspired the Una Corda Piano, made famous by Nils Frahm a couple of decades later.

the instrument

maker: Yamaha
built: 1970s
where: Japan
what it is: Electric grand: two strings per key, no soundboard

The Yamaha CP80: two strings per key and no soundboard, miked up close instead of taken off its pickup, for the Bardzo stage piano plugin.

Two strings per key and no soundboard - the CP-80 wasn't designed to be recorded acoustically, but that didn't stop me.

A grand that isn't that grand

The instrument is a Yamaha CP80. Yamaha built it in the 1970s as a stage piano, an electric grand that splits into two cases and travels from gig to gig (provided you have four strong men). Everything about it was designed to travel: two strings per key instead of three, no soundboard, and a pickup under the strings so a touring player could plug straight into the desk.

That pickup is how almost everyone records a CP80, for the bright, electric sound it's famous for. I went the other way: microphones on it, the strings recorded acoustically, the way you'd record a conventional grand. Up close and quiet, it turns intimate, and the playing comes right to the front: the hammers, the action, the wood. It still reads as a grand, just not the one you expect.

A Yamaha CP-80 recorded up close on a pair of Neumann KM-54 tube microphones into 1950s McCurdy AU300 preamps.

A pair of Neumann KM-54 tube SDC microphones right above the hammers.

Up close, all tube

I captured Bardzo across four microphone positions, all through tubes. Up close sat a pair of Neumann KM-54s I bought from Nils Frahm after his All Melody sessions, into 1950s McCurdy AU300 preamps, the same model used on Arcade Fire's The Suburbs and the backbone of my studio ever since I first heard a pair. Filling out the picture were 1940s Melodium ribbons and a pair of C12 tube mics, handmade in Switzerland.

The job was to commit the character while tracking, instead of leaving it for the mix. With a chain like this, the weight and the air are in the file before I touch a fader. I recorded close, with the knock of the action and the small noises kept in.

Then I sampled it deeply over a few months: several dynamic layers and multiple round-robins on every note, so no two presses answer quite the same. The due corde sustains (literally two strings, my little homage to the Una Corda) are the heart of it. From there I prepared the strings: felt over them for an Una Corda hush (muting every other string, so it really is una corda), soft and rubber mallets played straight onto the strings, harp-like plucks with the fingers, Marxophone rods, and a woody, bell-like patch right out at the edge.

Marxophone rods? A Marxophone is a zither-like instrument built between 1926 and 1936, with a strange springy rod mechanism: push the rods and they vibrate on the strings for a tremolo. I detached the mechanism and used it on the grand instead. World's biggest Marxophone.

Performing prepared articulations on the Yamaha CP-80 electric grand piano using Marxophone rods for the Bardzo plugin.

A felt mallet used to perform prepared articulations on the Yamaha CP-80 electric grand piano for the Bardzo plugin.

Bardzo features a range of prepared articulations, sampled by plucking, striking, and messing with the strings in different manners.

Leaving the piano behind

The acoustic patches were the patient half. The Afterglows are where the long nights went. They aren't effects sitting on top of the piano. They're separate pieces, built from takes I recorded only to wreck, then run through hardware until little of the original survives. Each one is its own experiment with musique concrète techniques (working with no fixed schedule helps: I have all the time in the world to arrive at sounds I'm happy with).

A Glimpse Of Hope layers tremolos played straight on the strings with vintage synths, guitar amps and a toy flute, into something that keeps shifting as you hold it. Sine Tapes started as 1950s lab sine generators, pushed through an unreasonable chain and recaptured through the body of the grand, thanks to a speaker placed underneath it. Potemkin is whatever was left after I pitch-shifted and filtered the piano, set against a dirty Soviet-era synth. And Fragments is three tape loops that drift in and out of sync with your DAW while you cut virtual tape.

Hold a note in any of them and it keeps moving, a single press swelling into something far bigger than the piano it came from. Plug in an MPE controller and you shape each note as it plays.

A Publison DHM-89 B2 stereo digital pitch shifter and a rack of vintage hardware effects, used in the Bardzo sampling sessions.

Not a cliché

Bardzo will never sound like a concert grand, and I never wanted it to. It's quiet and a little uneven, and it rewards leaning in. Do that and the instrument answers back: the felt knock of the hammers, the two strings ringing together. What a concert grand hides in its resonance is front and centre here. It's perfect for moments that call for a piano-ish sound, but could use something a little less familiar.

The trial lets you play most of the patches, free, with no time limit. Sit with it a while. I think it gets under your skin the way it got under mine.